A Room with a View

Lucy Honeychurch and her older cousin, Miss Bartlett, tour Italy in the springtime. However, the pension they are staying at may as well be in London. The proprietress speaks a London cockney, the meat is overdone, and their windows give them a view of dirty alleys. However, when the socially clumsy Mr. Emerson offer to exchange rooms, this does anything but remedy the situation. You see, nobody knows what to make of the Emersons. It's so hard to know how to respond to people who speak the truth.

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated work is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the story mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh.

The Rainbow

Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow revolves around three generations of Brangwens, a family deeply involved with the land and noted for their strength and vigour. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow, Lydia Lensky, and adopts her daughter Anna as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupts between them. Their stories continue in Women in Love.

The Name of the Rose

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. But his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. Brother William turns detective, and a uniquely deft one at that. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon-- all sharpened to a glistening edge by his wry humor and ferocious curiosity.

The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

Beginning in the heady days just after the First Crusade, this volume - the third in the series that began with The History of the Ancient World and The History of the Medieval World - chronicles the contradictions of a world in transition. Impressively researched and brilliantly told, The History of the Renaissance World offers not just the names, dates, and facts but the memorable characters who illuminate the years between 1100 and 1453 - years that marked a sea change in mankind's perception of the world.

Ulysses

Ulysses is regarded by many as the single most important novel of the 20th century. It tells the story of one day in Dublin, June 16th 1904, largely through the eyes of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman. Both begin a normal day, and both set off on a journey around the streets of Dublin, which eventually brings them into contact with one another.

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, perhaps the first recognizably modern individual. A nobleman, public official, and winegrower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them essays, meaning “attempts” or “tries.” He put whatever was in his head into them: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog’s ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the religious wars....

For Whom the Bell Tolls

In 1937, Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight", For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The Leopard

Elegiac, bittersweet and profoundly moving, The Leopard chronicles the turbulent transformation of the Risorgimento, in the period of Italian Unification. The waning feudal authority of the elegant and stately Prince of Salina is pitted against the materialistic cunning of Don Calogero, in Tomasi's magnificently descriptive memorial to a dying age.

A Moveable Feast

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. It is his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, filled with irreverent portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; tender memories of his first wife, Hadley; and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft.

Power Italian I Accelerated/Complete Written Listening Guide-Tapescript/8 One Hour Audio Lessons

Expert language teacher Mark Frobose talks you through the program in English while a trained native Italian speaker teaches you to speak Italian the way it is really spoken. This highly acclaimed method is so easy and so fast that you'll be speaking Italian within minutes of receiving your program and enjoying the process!

Publisher's Summary

Twilight in Italy describes Lawrence’s time as an educated working-class Englishman living among the Italian working men and women in the region around Lake Garda, from the Austrian Alps to the North, to Switzerland and finally Como and Milan. He captures the psyche of Italian peasants without ever romanticising or patronising them. His quick intuition locks onto their harsh, narrow lives and deep primitive emotions, exploring the very soul of Italy and its approach to life, death, belief, love, sexuality and change. His descriptions of the scenery and natural beauty of the country are evocative and find full expression in this masterpiece.

What the Critics Say

"Beginning with images and metaphor - loping strides, heads together, swaying skirts, bony vines, a frail moon, floating like icy on night, which is a river with currents - Lawrence paints an extremely sensuous and visual scene before moving into the abstractions of the neutrality of the law, the blood, the spirit, the infinite, the positive and the negative." (Paul Merrylees.)

I SO wanted to listen to this travelogue but I couldn't bear the sing song narration. Cathy Dobson brings no meaning to the words. David Shaw-Parker was marvelous in the DH Lawrence short stories. If he had read this, I'm certain I would have loved it ...... or at least been able to finish it. So disappointing.

I must agree with another reviewer Cathy Dobson was a horrible narrator, if you are expecting a book like Under the Tuscan Sun or some travel memoir, do not buy the book, it is not even close,and the narrator makes the book even worse, could not listen to more than 2 chapters, what a waste